The Four Agreements

Ruiz believes that everything humanity perceives is a dream. The mind perpetually dreams. The dreams are framed in a linear way when we are awake and in a nonlinear way when we are asleep—but in both cases, we are still dreaming. Humans are born with the capacity to dream, and we are taught to dream in the way that society dreams (“the dream of the planet”). We learn to dream like society by focusing our attention on the authority figures that teach us, like our parents, teachers, and religious officiants.  The “dream of the planet” includes concepts like what to believe, how to behave, what’s good and bad, what’s beautiful and ugly, and many other things. These concepts “hook” us through language, which is like a code full of agreements that we all understand.

Ruiz calls this process “the domestication of humans.” Domestication teaches us how to live and what to believe. As children, we are domesticated the same way animals are: by a system of punishment and reward. When children do what adults want, they are rewarded with attention (for example, the adult says things like “good girl”). Fearing punishment (rejection) and craving reward (attention) makes us act the way others act. Eventually, we become so good at this that we no longer need our parents to domesticate us or teach us to “dream” in a certain way. We learn to domesticate ourselves by punishing ourselves when we don’t follow the rules and rewarding ourselves when we do.

Ruiz says that when human beings are domesticated, we internalize all our “agreements” into a mental “Book of Law” which we use to constantly judge ourselves and others. When we judge ourselves, part of ourselves is a “Victim” who believes we are not good enough, and part of ourselves is a “Judge” who reinforces that “Yes, you are not good enough.” When we break the rules in our internal book, we experience fear, blame, guilt, and shame. When we comply, we feel safe.

For Ruiz, “true justice” is only paying once for each mistake we make, but domestication makes us pay many times for our mistakes. We judge ourselves when we make a mistake, but also every time we remember a mistake and every time somebody else reminds us of our mistake. Effectively, we feel perpetually guilty and constantly punish ourselves or create “emotional poison.” Ruiz believes that 95 percent of the agreements we have internalized are false and that “we suffer because we believe all these lies.”

Furthermore, people’s individual dreams may differ, but the “dream of the planet”—on a global level—is characterized by fear, injustice, violence, and war. Essentially, it’s a “nightmare” that’s controlled by fear. In fact, the “dream of human society” sounds quite a bit like the “hell” that many religions speak of—both are places of fear, suffering, punishment, and pain. We also learn to dream “hell” or “nightmares” in our personal dreams when we experience jealousy, hatred, and fear.

We are all searching for truth, justice, and beauty, because it is absent in our personal and social nightmares. The problem is that these things are already within and around us, but we can’t see them because the agreements and beliefs we have stored within us—or the dream that we have been taught—obscures our vision and we live in a “fog.” Ruiz thinks everything that humans believe we are is an illusion which restricts our freedom.   

Ruiz believes that we create an idea of perfection based on what will please others, like our parents and our society. We inevitably fail to live up this idea so we hide behind masks (to avoid rejection from others) and punish or abuse ourselves for failing to be perfect. In fact, Ruiz believes that nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves. Even our relationships are just toleration of abuse: if somebody abuses us less that we abuse ourselves, we’ll tolerate the relationship. Otherwise, we won’t. If we abuse ourselves a lot, we’ll even tolerate humiliation and violence from others. All this abuse stems from our image of perfection—because we fail to meet it, we can’t accept ourselves or others the way we are.

Each person—including you—makes thousands of agreements with others, including your parents, partners, children, God, and society. However, the most important ones are the agreements you make with yourself in which you tell yourself who you are, what you believe, and what you’re capable of doing. Your agreements with yourself comprise your personality. Ruiz thinks that if you want to live a joyful, fulfilled, and empowered life, you must to be brave enough to break the agreements that are based in fear. 

Ruiz argues that humans are born with a certain amount of power that rebuilds every night. We usually spend all our power on keeping the agreements we have made, so we feel powerless and trapped in “the dream of the planet.” But if we don’t like our lives, we need to change the agreements we keep. Ruiz proposes that there are “four very powerful agreements” that will break apart the other fear-based agreements that use up all our energy—but it takes a lot of mental resolve to adopt them. Ruiz believes it’s worth it, though, as adopting them will return all our spent energy to us and our lives will be transformed. We can replace the “dream of hell” that we live in by creating a new dream of “heaven.”